Rob Katz, Vice President of Business Development with Lulu.com answers some questions from Metaprinter regarding the recent launch of Amazon.com’s competition website CreateSpace.com and what impact this will have on their business model.

For those of you who don’t know, Amazon’s CreateSpace is offering cd, dvd, book, print on demand, and self publishing services. They are the first big competitor to challenge Lulu.com.

I want to thank Lulu for agreeing to answer my questions and without further ado I give you Lulu.

1. When Amazon announced it was buying large quantities of Indigo presses (Dec. 4, 2006), you must have had some inclination this direct competition was coming. How did you prepare for it?
This is a highly competitive industry. We have known that for some time and there are a lot of respected competitors out there; recent announcements just further validate what Lulu has been working diligently on for the past 4+ years. Our focus is to continue to create products and solutions that best serve our customers while managing the areas we look to expand into strategically.

2. How do you differentiate yourself from Amazon’s service?

Lulu has grown to be an industry leader in the print-on-demand and self publishing areas with a focus on empowering creators. Over the last year, Lulu has expanded those product and services offerings to larger content creators, corporations, educational institutions and rights-holders. The ability of Lulu’s platform and product offerings to scale to meet the needs of such a wide ranging group of users is a distinct competitive advantage.

With a solid and growing foundation of our core community – more than 1.2 million registered users and more than 4000 new works published each week – Lulu now also has partnerships with Universal Press Syndicate, Getty Images, the National Institue for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD, the Association of National Advertisers, and many others who leverage Lulu’s scalable platform to buy, sell, create and manage digital content.

Lulu also provides creators with access to the most extensive distribution system available all the while allowing them to retain complete control over their content and pricing. With Lulu’s unique Published By You services, creators literally become their own publisher. Their books are listed on the three major industry databases and available to more than 60,000 retailers, both online and brick and mortar, as well as added to the Google Book Search database.

Lulu also takes a very global view of our business. The site is currently translated into six languages and with offices in Raleigh, NC (headquarters) as well as London, England and Hamilton, Ontario (CA), we are committed to remaining aggressive with our international focus.

3. What can we expect in the future from lulu?

Lulu will be going through a major site re-launch, targeted for late August. The new architecture will be reflective of Lulu’s growth and be geared to work to better meet the needs of our growing and diversified user base. With the new release, Lulu will also be unveiling the Lulu StudioTM , a web-based publishing application; Our primary goal for this tool is enabling our users to create projects that result in professional-quality physical products through the utilization of industry standard typesetting methods and technology. This leading-edge solution will allow users for the first time to incorporate licensed content from Getty Images, Collegiate Images and others on a per image, per use basis to enhance their works with professional, high-quality images. The Lulu StudioTM will be launched as a photobook application, with calendars and full typesetting functionality (images + text) coming in future releases, providing Lulu users with more content creation flexibility than ever before.

4. Any closing remarks?

Thanks for your interest in Lulu and if we can answer any additional questions, please let us know.

Metapriter thanks you for this interview. I personally would like to see where Lulu gets 80% of their revenue and to pump that up as much as possible. Abandon what is not working and move ahead. A monstrous company like Amazon can squash smaller endeavors without much effort. Time will tell, what do you think?